The Company

by Robert Littell

  Philby raised a palm to shield his eyes from the bright sun and squinted across the Gettysburg countryside. “Where did a B-b-bolshevik like you learn about the American Civil War?”

  Given the situation, Eugene didn’t want to pass on personal information that, if divulged, could one day help the FBI identify him. After all, how many Russian exchange students had studied American history at Yale? “At Lomonosov State University in Moscow,” he replied evenly.

  Philby snickered. “There’s a ropey story if I ever heard one. Forget I asked.”

  A guide leading a group of visitors up the hill could be heard reciting Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. “‘…are engaged in a great Civil War, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.’”

  “Bloody pertinent question, you want my view.” Philby, a paper grocery bag tucked under one arm, took Eugene’s elbow and steered him away from the group. They strolled along the ridge, past children spooning ice cream out of Dixie Cups, past a family picnicking in the shade of a tree, until they were out of earshot. Eugene asked, “You’re sure you weren’t followed?”

  “That’s why I was late,” Philby said. “I went round in bloody circles better p-p-part of an hour playing lost. Stopped to ask a gas station attendant directions to Antietam in Maryland, just in case. What you have to tell me must be bloody important to drag me away from my creature comforts on a Saturday, Eugene.”

  “The news isn’t good,” Eugene admitted.

  Surveying the battlefield, Philby let this sink in. “Didn’t think it would be,” he muttered.

  Tuning in the Moscow frequency on the Motorola the night before, Eugene had picked up one of his personal codes (“That’s correct. ‘But if I’m not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle!’ is definitely from Alice in Wonderland”) on the cultural quiz program. Using the lucky ten-dollar bill, he had transformed the winning lottery number into a Washington-area telephone number and called it at midnight from a public phone booth. He found himself talking to the woman with the thick Polish accent. “Gene, is that you? A small packet has been attached to the back of the garbage bin in the parking lot,” she said, all business. “In it is an envelope. Memorize the contents, burn the instructions and carry them out immediately.” The woman cleared her throat. “Your mentor, the Old Man, wishes you to tell our mutual friend that he regrets things turned out this way. Say to him the Old Man wishes him a safe journey and looks forward eagerly to seeing him again. I would be pleased to talk more with you but I have been instructed not to.” Then the line went dead.

  Eugene dialed Bernice’s number. “I had a fantastic day,” she said breathlessly. “I got forty-four new signatures on my Rosenberg petition.”

  “I won’t be coming over tonight,” he told her.

  “Oh?”

  “Something important came up.”

  He could hear the disappointment in her voice. “Naturally I understand. Tomorrow, then.”

  “Tomorrow for sure.”

  Eugene went out behind the liquor store and felt around between the back of the garbage bin and the wall until he discovered the packet taped to the bin. Locking himself in the attic apartment, he tore open the envelope and extracted a sheet of paper crammed with four-number code groups. Working from a one-time pad hidden inside the cover of a matchbook, he deciphered the message, which had come from Starik himself. Eugene committed the contents to memory, repeating it several times to be sure he had it down pat, then burned the letter and the one-time pad in a saucepan and flushed the ashes down the toilet. Grabbing two bottles of Lagavulin Malt Whisky from a shelf in the liquor store, jumping into the station wagon parked in the alley, he headed along Canal Road to Arizona Avenue, then turned onto Nebraska and pulled up in front of the two-story brick house with the large bay window. Another automobile was parked behind Philby’s car in the driveway. Eugene left the motor running and went up the walkway and rang the bell. After a moment the vestibule light came on and the front door opened. A disheveled Philby, wine stains on his shirt front, peered out at him, his eyes puffy from alcohol and lack of sleep. For an instant he couldn’t seem to place Eugene. When it dawned on him who his visitor was, he seemed startled. “I d-d-didn’t order anything—“ he mumbled, half-looking back over his shoulder.

  “Yes, you did,” Eugene insisted.

  “Who is it, Adrian?” someone called from inside the house.

  “Liquor delivery, Jimbo. D-d-didn’t want the river to run dry on us, did I?”

  Through the open door Eugene caught a glimpse of a gaunt, stoop-shouldered figure pulling a book from a shelf and leafing through it. “There’s a time, a place, some instructions written in plain text on the inside cover of one of the cartons,” Eugene whispered. “Don’t forget to burn it.” He handed Philby an invoice. Philby disappeared into the house and returned counting out bills from a woman’s snap purse. “Keep the change, old boy,” he said in a voice loud enough to be overheard.

  “In a hundred years you’d never guess who was visiting me when you d-d-dropped by so unexpectedly last night.” Philby was saying now. They had reached the commemorative stone marking the furthest Confederate advance of Pickett’s charge on July 3, 1863. “It was the illustrious Jimbo Angleton himself, Mr. Counterintelligence in the flesh, come to commiserate with me—seems like one of the Company underlings, a rum chap from Berlin with an Italian-sounding name, has d-d-decided I’m the rotter who’s been giving away CIA secrets to the ghastly KGB.”

  “Angleton told you that!”

  “Jimbo and I go back to the Creation,” Philby explained. “He knows I couldn’t be a Soviet mole.” He had a good chuckle at this, though it was easy to see his heart wasn’t in it.

  “I’m afraid it’s not a laughing matter,” Eugene remarked. “Did you bring all your paraphernalia with you.”

  “Stuff’s here in the bag,” Philby said morosely.

  “You didn’t leave anything behind? Sorry, but I was told to ask you this.” Philby shook his head.

  Eugene took the paper bag filled with the objects that would doom Philby if the Americans discovered them—one-time pads, miniature cameras, film canisters, microdot readers, a volume of poems by William Blake with instructions for emergency dead drops rolled up in a hollow in the binding. “I’ll get rid of this—I’ll go home on back roads and bury it somewhere.”

  “Why all the alarums? Just b-b-because one cheeky bugger comes out of the woodwork and wags a finger at me is no reason to p-p-push the bloody p-p-p-p”—Philby, clearly unnerved, had trouble spitting out the words. “Panic button.” Annoyed with himself, he took a deep breath. “Dodgy business, living on the cutting edge,” he muttered. “Hard on the nerves. Time to let the bloody cat out of the bloody bag, hey? What’s up? Didn’t Burgess warn Maclean in time? Didn’t Maclean get off ahead of the coppers?”

  “Maclean left England last night. He’s on his way to Moscow via East Germany.”

  “Wizard. Where’s the bloody p-p-problem?”

  “Burgess lost his nerve and went with him.”

  “Burgess buggered off!” Philby looked away quickly. Breathing in little gasps, he scrubbed his lips with the back of his hand. “The bloody little bastard! That is hard cheese.”

  “The British will discover Maclean is missing when they turn up Monday morning to question him about the HOMER business. Won’t take them long to figure out Burgess has skipped with him. At which point the alarm bells will go off in London and Washington.”

  “And all those beady eyes will focus on yours truly,” Philby said gloomily.

  “Burgess got you into this business,” Eugene agreed. “Until he headed back to England to warn Maclean, he was boarding with you in Washington. On top of that there are half a dozen serials that point in your direction. You knew from Angleton that the Americans had deciphered bits of text that identified Maclean as the Soviet agent HOMER. You knew the British were going to take hi
m into custody and begin questioning him Monday morning. Then there are the émigré operations that ended in disaster. There is the business of the Vishnevsky defection.” Eugene thought he had made his case. “The rezident figures you have thirty-six hours to get out of the country. You brought your backup passport with you, I hope.”

  “So Starik wants me to run for it, then?”

  “He doesn’t think you have a choice.” Eugene pulled the small package from his jacket. “There’s hair dye, a mustache, eyeglasses, forty-eight hundred dollars in ten- and twenty-dollar bills. I have an old raincoat for you in the station wagon. We’ll remove your license plates and leave your car here—it’ll take the local police a couple of days to trace it to you, by which time you’ll be far away. I’ll drop you at the Greyhound terminal in Harrisburg. The route is written out in the package—Harrisburg to Buffalo to Niagara Falls, where you cross to the Canadian side. A car will be waiting to take you to a safe house in Halifax. Starik’s people will put you on a freighter bound for Poland.”

  Eugene could see trouble coming; Philby’s eyes were clouding over. He put a hand on the Englishman’s shoulder. “You’ve been on the firing line for twenty years. It’s time for you to come home.”

  “Home!” Philby took a step back. “I am a C-c-communist and a M-m-marxist but Russia is not my home. England is.”

  Eugene started to say something but Philby cut him off. “Sorry, old boy, but I don’t see myself living in Moscow, do I? What I relished all these years, aside from serving the great Cause, was the great game. In Moscow there will be no game, only airless offices and stale routines and dull bureaucrats who know whose side I’m on.”

  Eugene’s instructions had not dealt with the possibility that Philby would refuse Starik’s order to run for it. He decided to reason with him. “Their interrogators are skillful—they will offer you immunity if you cooperate, they will try and turn you into a triple agent—“

  Philby bristled. “I have never been a double agent—I have served one master from the beginning—so how can I become a triple agent?”

  “I didn’t mean to suggest they would succeed…”

  Philby, his eyes narrowed, his jaw thrust forward, was weighing his chances and beginning to like what he saw. A thin smile illuminated his face; it made him look almost healthy. His stutter vanished. “All the government have to go on is circumstantial evidence. A bitch of a Communist wife twenty years back, governor, where’s the tort? Half a dozen moldy serials, some coincidences that I can explain away as coincidences. And I have an ace up my sleeve, don’t I?”

  “An ace up your sleeve?”

  “Berlin Base has a big operation going—a highly placed defector delivering them goodies twice a week. I passed this on to Moscow Centre but for reasons that are a mystery to me they didn’t close it down. I can hear the dialogue now: do you really think this operation would still be running, governor, if I were on the KGB payroll? Not bloody likely! Christ, man, when you boil off the bouillon there is no hard evidence. All I need to do is keep my nerve and bluff it out.”

  “They broke Klaus Fuchs—they managed to get him to confess.”

  “You are relatively new at this business, Eugene,” Philby said. He was standing straighter, gathering confidence from the sound of his own voice. “What you do not appreciate is that the inquisitors are in a desperately weak position. Without a confession, old boy, their evidence is conjectural—too bloody vague to be used in court. Besides which, if they were to take my case to court, they’d have to blow agents and operations.” Philby, shifting his weight onto the balls of his feet and circling Eugene, was almost prancing with excitement now. “As long as I refuse to confess, the jammy bastards won’t be able to lay a glove on me, will they? Oh, my career will be out onto the hard but I will be free as a lark. The great game can go on.”

  Eugene played his last card. “You and I are foot soldiers in a war,” he told Philby. “Our vision is limited—we only see the part of the battlefield that is right in front of our eyes. Starik sees the big picture—the whole war, the complex maneuvers and counter-maneuvers of each side. Starik has given you an order. As a soldier you have no choice in the matter. You must obey it.” He held out the package. “Take it and run,” he said.

  16

  WASHINGTON, DC, MONDAY, MAY 28, 1951

  THE DIRECTOR’S REGULAR NOON POWWOW HAD BEEN CANCELLED and an ad hoc war council had been hurriedly convened in the small, windowless conference room across the hall from his office. The DCI, Bedell Smith, sitting under a framed copy of one of his favorite Churchill dictums (“Men occasionally stumble over the truth but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened”), presided from the head of the oval table. Present were the Barons who could be rounded up on short notice: the DD/O, Allen Dulles; his chief of operations, Frank Wisner; Wisner’s number two, Dick Helms; General Truscott, who happened to be in Washington on Pentagon business; Jim Angleton; and (in Angleton’s words, muttered as the participants queued for coffee in the corridor while the Technical Service’s housekeepers swept the conference room for bugs) “the star of the show, the one and only…Harvey Torriti!”

  General Smith, who had spent the weekend reviewing the Sorcerer’s memorandum and Angleton’s written rebuttal, wasn’t “tickled pink,” as he delicately put it, to discover he had been on the receiving end of one of Torriti’s barium meals. “Nothing’s sacred round here,” he griped, “if you think the leak could come from the DCI’s office.”

  Torriti, shaved, shined, decked out in a tie and sports jacket and a freshly laundered shirt, was uncommonly low-keyed, not to mention sober. “Couldn’t make my case that the leaks came from Philby,” he pointed out, “if I hadn’t foreclosed the alternatives.”

  Dulles, puffing away on his pipe, remarked pleasantly, “According to Jim, you haven’t made your case.” He slipped his toes out of the bedroom slippers he always wore in the office because of gout and propped his stockinged feet up on an empty chair. “We need to tread carefully on this one,” he continued, reaching over to massage his ankles. “Our relations with the cousins can only survive this kind of accusation if we’re dead right.”

  Helms, a cool, aloof bureaucrat who had more in common with the patient intelligence gatherers than the clandestine service’s cowboys, leaned toward Angleton’s point of view. “Your line of reasoning is intriguing,” he told Torriti, “but Jim is right—when you strip it down to the nitty-gritty, what you’re left with could easily be a series of coincidences.”

  “In our line of work,” Torriti argued, “coincidences don’t exist.”

  The Wiz, his shirtsleeves rolled up above his elbows, his chair tilted back against the wall, his eyes half closed, allowed as how the Sorcerer might be on to something there. A coincidence was like a matador’s red cape; if you spotted one, your instinct told you to do more than stand there and paw at the ground in frustration. Which is why, Wisner added, he’d taken a gander at various logs after he’d read the Sorcerer’s memorandum. Wiz flashed one of his guileless gap-toothed smiles in Angleton’s direction. “On Monday, 1 January,” he said, reading from a note he’d jotted to himself on the back of an envelope, “Torriti’s cable arrived on Jim’s desk. On Tuesday, 2 January, security logs in the lobby show Philby visiting both General Smith and Jim here. Starting in late afternoon on Tuesday, 2 January, radio intercept logs show a dramatic increase in the volume of cipher wireless traffic between the Soviet embassy and Moscow.” The Wiz peered down the table at General Smith. “Seems to me like someone might have gone and pushed the panic button over there.”

  Torriti positioned a forefinger along the side of a nostril. It almost appeared as if he were asking permission to speak. “When all the pieces lock into place,” he said, “we’d need to be off our rockers to go on trusting Philby. All I’m saying is we ought to ship him back to England COD, then get ahold of the Brits and lay out what we have and let them grill the shit out of him. They broke Fuchs. They
’ll break Philby.”

  “We’ll look like horse’s asses if we go out there with accusations we can’t prove,” Helms said lazily.

  “I don’t believe I’m hearing what I’m hearing,” Torriti groaned, struggling to keep the cap on his pressure cooker of a temper. “Here we have a guy who began his adult life as a Cambridge socialist, who got hitched to a Communist activist in Vienna…” He looked around the table to see if anything alcoholic had somehow ended up amid all the bottles of seltzer. “Holy shit, the fucker’s been betraying one operation after another—“

  “There are operations he knew about that weren’t betrayed,” Angleton snapped.